him in the back room clad in an army overcoat bereft of its Q^ 

 buttons and frogs, bought from an officer in the Philippines. 

 Half through our stew, he turned to me to say: "You know 

 I won't be able to pay for this." 



His Christmas days, however, were brighter. Marie had 

 asked him to Cincinnati for the week, better to know the fam- 

 ily. He had met its membership only casually before — the 

 Reverend Dr Albert J Nast (stanch and intellectual Methodist 

 of such charm that an unbeliever once said of him: "If he 

 talked to me an hour, he would make me a Christian") ; Aunt 

 Fannie Gamble (the sister of Dr Nast, who had taken the place 

 of Marie's long dead mother as her guardian angel both spiritu- 

 ally and materially) ; the second wife. Their days together 

 went happily except for restrictions imposed upon Wherry's 

 smoking. What had become his habit in this direction may 

 as well be told here. He had been graduated from medical 

 school without the touch of wine, women or weed upon his 

 lips. In the Philippines, Woolley used to say, the wine had 

 made the hurdle because the weather was depressing; and 

 there, too, the tobacco had gone over. It was both soothing 

 and cheap. Wherry was to prove himself the world's hardest 

 smoker and of the worst cigars. He began in the morning of 

 days when men still wore night shirts and his last muscular 

 movement at night was not the switching off of a light but 

 the killing of a cigar. Early broken to what only Malays, 

 trained on papa's stumps in the Philippine archipelago, can 

 endure, he was graduated to "3 for 5" stogies on arrival in 

 U S A, to change, as his prosperity increased, to "2 for 5." 

 After marriage his wife used to buy stogies for him in what 

 she called "muff boxes" — and three such at once. He died 

 still believing their tobaccos of unequalled quality. 



Wherry's confidence that "something would turn up" was 

 not misplaced. While in Cincinnati Hektoen wrote him 

 (December 26, 1905) : "I have what I think very good news 

 for you. You do not need to hurry back but so soon as you 

 return, please come in so I can show you the promised land." 



